The strongest evidence linking the alleged hijackers to 9/11 was a video said to be from the closed circuit TV (CCTV) system at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC. The video was not made available until the day before the 9/11 Commission Report was released, in 2004, and it helped to pave the way for widespread acceptance of the official account. Since the other evidence against the accused hijackers was dubious and suspiciously convenient for the FBI, which provided it, the Dulles video should be examined closely.

Doing so has led some independent 9/11 investigators to conclude that the Dulles video contains “no information to link its images to AA 77.” Reasons include that:

None of the Dulles airport staff remembered seeing the alleged hijackers at the airport

Dulles had over 300 cameras but no footage was released except for portions of this one video (and no video was available from the other airports)

The alleged Dulles video contains no date, time stamp, or camera identification

The video was shot at a rate of 30 frames per second (fps), which the investigators said is not typical of CCTV videos

The video appears to be an edited composite of shots taken from different angles

Additionally, it has been noticed that the airport screeners in the Dulles video did not perform their duties according to airport requirements. An attorney representing 9/11 victims’ families stated that security agents in the video screened the suspects in ways that were not like those required in Dulles training videos.

Could the video be fraudulent?

Dulles airport security manager Ed Nelson said that the FBI confiscated the actual video from the CCTV system “some time after 10:00 a.m.” on 9/11. Nelson wondered how the FBI “knew who the hijackers were out of hundreds of people going through the checkpoints.” Two days later it was reported that FBI agents had “examined footage from dozens of cameras at the three airports where the terrorists boarded the aircraft.” However, the official account claimed that no such footage existed except for the one video later released as the Dulles CCTV evidence.

Recently, I had an online discussion with a man who managed maintenance of the Dulles CCTV system until mid-2000. His comments shed some light on questions of whether the video is genuine. This was the second of two former employees of Stratesec who made comments on my blog early this year. Stratesec was the security company that had contracts for several of the facilities impacted on 9/11 including Dulles Airport, the WTC, and United Airlines.

Like the first former Stratesec employee who contacted me, Andrew Olson, the Dulles video manager (calling himself only “David C”) is now working on contracts for the U.S. Department of Defense. David C’s comments on my blog were made from an IP address belonging to the U.S. DOD Network Information Center in Washington, DC, run by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Apparently, David C went from a job at Stratesec to working for a “dot com start-up…just two blocks from the WTC” to working at the DIA where he makes comments defending Stratesec.

That these two former Stratesec employees now serve as military suppliers reflects the fact that Stratesec’s leaders also went on to profit from the crimes of 9/11. For example, the company’s chief operating office Barry McDaniel started a police-state supply business with a close colleague of Dick Cheney. And Stratesec’s chief executive, Wirt D. Walker, went on to run businesses with people who have close ties to U.S. military and intelligence agencies.

David C worked for Stratesec from 1995 to 2000, in the role of Senior Field Engineer Technician for most of that time. He was responsible for operations of security systems, access control systems, badging systems, and CCTV systems installation and management at Dulles airport. He has provided images of documents that support these claims. It’s important to note that David C was not operating these systems at the time of 9/11. Management of the Dulles CCTV system had changed from Stratesec to ADT a year before the attacks.

The cameras used in the Dulles CCTV system came from Verint Video Solutions. Coincidentally, Verint cameras were also used at the Pentagon, the WTC and, later, in the London subway system at the time of the July 2007 bombing. It was Verint employee David Brent who reported that he had viewed all the video from over 300 cameras that had recorded the events at Dulles on 9/11.

When David C was asked about the evidence suggesting the Dulles 9/11 video might be altered or fraudulent, he responded with extensive comments, many of which were not specific enough to be useful. With regard to the five reasons listed above, the most important of David C’s answers relate to reasons 3 and 4.

Why was there no timestamp on the video? David C’s answer: Dulles used a state-of-the-art Loronix video software system. The system recorded date and time information, which could not be altered. But the video could be exported without the timestamp showing. This was done in some cases where the timestamp obscured some of what was taking place.

How could the video be shot at 30 fps when typical security video is at 1 to 4 fps? David C’s answer: The state-of-the-art Loronix recording software allowed for “real time” (30 fps) video to be recorded and stored for up to two weeks.

The use of Loronix video software at Dulles was confirmed in a 1998 paper (pdf) from the University of Southampton. The paper states that, with the Loronix system, “Each video clip is fingerprinted through a mathematical algorithm during the video capture process. The fingerprint becomes part of the clip and is used by the playback software to verify the video has not been altered.” Therefore, although the date and time stamp are not necessarily present, the Dulles video file can be confirmed to be genuine and unaltered if one has access to the Loronix software program in which to view it. The video can be downloaded here although it is not in the original format.

It’s interesting that the video did not appear as publicly available evidence until 2004, more than a year after the Dulles system was upgraded in a way that allowed the video files to be accessed remotely. Until the video fingerprint is confirmed independently, the question of whether the video genuinely represents activities filmed on 9/11 at Dulles will remain unanswered.

Additionally, it’s odd that David C knew about the Loronix software but said he had never heard of Verint, the company that manufactured the cameras and owned the Loronix product. He also stated “I think we may have had only two cameras at the security checkpoints [at Dulles]” and yet could not explain how the evidentiary video appeared to be made of shots from different angles. Perhaps follow-up questions will reveal more of the truth.

If the video is a fake, how could that have been done? There are a number of considerations in answering this question.

The video was leaked to the press (at a politically timed moment) in 2004 by the law firm Motley Rice, represented at the time by terrorism propagandist Jean-Charles Brisard. How the firm came by the video was never reported. However, it is known that the FBI confiscated the original video and had shown it to a 9/11 family member who said, “the terrorists’ faces had been digitally disguised.” Why would the FBI take the time to digitally disguise the faces of dead suspects? Moreover, if the Bureau could do that what other modifications could be done?

The FBI made at least one “training film” at Dulles. The Bureau had strong ties to Stratesec as well, in that the company’s president from 1998 to 1999 was Charles Archer, the FBI’s former Assistant Director In Charge of the Criminal Justice Information Services Division. Stratesec’s directors had also previously owned a movie production company called Prism Entertainment.

How about Verint? In 2002, the year before remote access to Dulles video files became a possibility and two years before the video was released, the company named Howard Safir as a director. Safir is a former New York City Police and Fire Commissioner who was appointed to those roles by his close friend (and 9/11 suspect) Rudy Giuliani. Did Safir have any role in release of the Dulles video?

In any case, because the Dulles 9/11 video is the strongest evidence implicating the alleged hijackers, investigating its validity remains important. As shown above, questions that remain unanswered about the video can still be resolved with an objective approach that is open to dialogue and open to possibilities.

There continues to be interest in the links between Saudi Arabia and the crimes of 9/11. Although those links often point back to powerful people in the U.S., the mainstream media tends to focus the story on Saudi Arabia alone. That seems to be due to the fact that control of natural resources in the Middle East is what really drives terrorism. Nonetheless, it’s important to continue revealing Saudi connections to 9/11 because they can help us understand what really happened.

Reporter Margie Burns first revealed that Stratesec, the security company for the World Trade Center and other 9/11-impacted facilities, held its annual meetings in offices leased by Saudi Arabia. That fact highlights the glaring lack of investigation into the men who ran Stratesec.

Stratesec had security contracts not only for the WTC complex, but also for Dulles airport—where American Airlines Flight 77 took off—and United Airlines, which owned two of the other three hijacked planes. The company’s directors and investors were an interesting group as was the chief operating officer, Barry McDaniel.

Walker was the son of a CIA officer and his activities paralleled those of known CIA operatives. Today, many of Walker’s colleagues have top-secret clearances, suggesting that, like his father, Walker has ties to U.S. intelligence.

Stratesec held its annual meetings in office space leased by the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission. This was at the Watergate office building in Washington DC (2600 Virginia Ave, NW), in suite 900. Stratesec’s parent company, the Kuwait-American Corporation, used that Saudi-leased office as its business address.

Some of Walker’s other businesses listed the Saudi Cultural Mission’s offices as their primary business address in SEC filings. This included Prism Entertainment, which made and distributed movies, and ILC Technology, a maker of “high intensity lamps.” Coincidentally, ILC’s subsidiary United Detector Technology made flash detectors that could be used for igniting explosives.

Walker’s company Aviation General also held its annual meetings in the Saudi-leased offices. What’s more, the operational offices for Aviation General are now occupied by Zacarias Moussaoui’s flight trainer.

U.S. politicians and media have no interest in these and other facts that link Saudi Arabia and the U.S. deep state to the crimes of 9/11. Apparently, it’s not the truth that drives the calls for more information about Saudi connections to 9/11, it’s only the possibility of gaining more control over Saudi resources.

When people ask me what more can be done to achieve 9/11 truth and justice, I tell them to spend less time calling for a new investigation and more time investigating. Even without subpoena power, independent investigators can make a lot of progress. To help with that effort, here are three steps for an independent investigation and an objective way to evaluate suspects in the 9/11 crimes.

The first step is to ask specific, well-formulated questions. What do we need to know? We need to know things like how explosives got into the WTC, how the North American air defenses failed, how the U.S. chain of command and communication systems failed, how the alleged hijackers got away with so much, and how the planes were hijacked.

Here are examples of specific questions that will help answer these questions.

What more can we learn from the official accounts about transponder and autopilot use on 9/11?

Who was invited to the explosive disposal/terrorism meeting at WTC 7 on the morning 9/11 and what was the agenda?

What do the strip clubs, bars, and other businesses frequented by the alleged hijackers have in common?

The second step is to collect information that might help to answer the questions. Good sources of information include the following.

It also helps to interview people who have detailed knowledge about the events. Most of the people who were present at the time of the attacks and during the official investigations are still alive and some of them will answer questions.

Additionally, useful information can be obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Direct requests to federal, state, or local agencies using resources like these:

The third step to investigation is to collect the information, analyze it, and then communicate it clearly and objectively. Collecting the information is relatively easy. Analysis might include categorizing or framing the information in ways that help to see linkages. Examples include creating a timeline of events or a matrix of people and events, and considering if the new information fits into the existing body of knowledge. Once new information is ready to communicate to others, there are a lot of venues for doing that. A good example is 911Blogger.

Naming Suspects and Evaluating Evidence

As answers are found or proposed, it becomes clear that there are people who can be named as legitimate suspects in the 9/11 crimes. Things can get a bit tricky here and it’s easy to be misled. What makes someone a legitimate suspect? To answer that, it helps to understand three different types of evidence: direct, indirect, and negative. Let’s start with five examples of what I would cite as direct evidence related to 9/11.

Direct evidence

The suspect was in a position on 9/11 to directly facilitate the crimes.

Evidence exists that the suspect did something on 9/11 that directly facilitated the crimes.

Evidence exists to charge the suspect with a crime related to 9/11.

The suspect was in a position prior to 9/11 to facilitate the 9/11 crimes.

Evidence exists to charge the suspect with having done something prior to 9/11 that facilitated the 9/11 crimes.

All of the suspects in my book, Another Nineteen, were named based on direct evidence. An example is Wirt Dexter Walker. As the CEO of Stratesec, he was in position to provide access to those who planted explosives in the WTC, as well as prevent that access from being detected. Walker can also be charged with 9/11 insider trading.

Another example is Ralph Eberhart, who sponsored the military exercises that obstructed the air defenses on 9/11. Eberhart also appears to have lowered the Infocon (communications defense) level just hours before the attacks, and gave orders that directly obstructed the interceptors. He also lied to the U.S. Congress about having received documented notification of the hijackings (a crime).

When one or more of pieces of direct evidence are established for a suspect, it makes sense to evaluate indirect evidence. Here are five types.

Indirect evidence

The suspect had foreknowledge of the 9/11 crimes.

The suspect benefited from the 9/11 crimes.

The suspect failed to cooperate with the official 9/11 investigations, obstructed those investigations, or lied to investigators.

The suspect was an expert in the technologies that were required to make 9/11 happen (e.g. communications systems, remote control technology).

Evidence exists that the suspect was involved in other terrorist acts or previous U.S. deep state events.

An example of a suspect for which both direct and indirect evidence exists is Barry McDaniel, the Chief Operating Officer of Stratesec. Besides having the power to grant access to those who planted explosives in the WTC, McDaniel also had expertise in the distribution of explosives from his days as the U.S. Army’s director of Materiel Readiness. That same previous position makes him a suspect in the Iran-Contra crimes. McDaniel benefited from 9/11 by starting a police-state supply company with Dick Cheney’s old business partner, Bruce Bradley.

Similarly, Ralph Eberhart is a suspect for whom there exists both direct and indirect evidence. As CINCNORAD and CINCSPACE, Eberhart was an expert on the air defense, communications, and possibly related space, systems. He also failed to cooperate with the official investigations, telling his staff to just change their responses to investigators as those responses were shown to be invalid.

Is it enough to use only indirect evidence? For example, is it enough to say that the suspect benefited from the crimes? If so, there are millions, or maybe billions, of suspects. This includes everyone who profited from the 9/11 Wars or the police state policies that have resulted. It might also include anyone who was threatened by the countries that the U.S. has attacked since 9/11: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. That would be a huge number of people so the answer is no, benefiting from 9/11 is not enough to make someone (or an entire country) a legitimate 9/11 suspect.

Is foreknowledge of the attacks enough to name someone as a legitimate suspect? If so, the governments of at least a dozen countries are all suspects. Therefore the answer is no, in the absence of direct evidence foreknowledge is not enough to name a person (or an entire country) as a 9/11 suspect.

For instance, some people are convinced that Israel committed the crimes of 9/11. When asked why they think this, the answer is usually that Israel had foreknowledge as indicated by the “Dancing Israelis” and that Israel benefited because of the countries that were attacked after 9/11. However, as indicated above this reasoning is not convincing and would certainly never stand up in a court of law.

Both foreknowledge and benefiting are examples of indirect evidence. And although indirect evidence can be helpful, direct evidence is needed to charge someone with a crime. Moreover, the direct evidence must focus on what actually happened on 9/11 that should not have happened, and what did not happen that should have happened. And that means we must focus on the specific people who were in position to make those things so.

Once direct evidence exists for a suspect, negative evidence can also be used to build the case. Negative evidence related to the 9/11 crimes includes the fact that some people did not do their jobs, either in defending the country or in investigating the case afterward. For example, Ralph Eberhart, for whom there exists both direct and indirect evidence that he was involved, failed to implement military control over U.S. airspace when he should have.

In the end, it’s possible that only independent investigation will reveal more of the truth about what happened on 9/11. But that power exists within people who spend considerable time today calling for others to investigate or posting strongly worded messages on social media. If we can harness that power and direct it toward the logical and objective answering of pertinent questions, we can make real progress.

The terrorist events of 2015 continued to fuel speculation that most terrorism is government-sponsored and focuses on achieving political objectives. A majority of the attacks were attributed to groups located in the relatively small region of southwestern Eurasia that has been the focus of competition for resources among the world’s superpowers. The political will to drive seizure of those resources requires a fear of terrorism so that “responses” can happen without interference from the public. Maintaining the fear is what appears to be the primary objective behind the attacks.

Since 9/11, terrorist acts in Western countries have exhibited a formulaic set of common features that suggest the government might have been involved in the crimes. Here are ten such features.

Evidence against the accused is usually composed of hearsay claims or dubious documents that originate with military or law enforcement sources.

The hearsay evidence typically includes vague accusations that the suspects were in contact with, had “links” to, or made recent pledges of allegiance to, terrorist leaders.

The documentary evidence includes things like passports conveniently left at the scene or social media postings that imply a commitment to terrorism.

There is an overly obvious attempt to associate the terrorists with Islam.

The suspects are usually dead by the time the first reports come out.

People who knew the accused often say they had absolutely no idea that their friend/neighbor/family member was involved or interested in terrorism in any way.

The testimony of eyewitnesses is ignored as authorities provide contradictory stories that quickly become the official, media-driven accounts.

Eyewitnesses often describe the attackers as armed and outfitted like highly trained, and well-supported, special operations soldiers.

The attacks usually coincide with military or law enforcement exercises that mimic what happens.

The incidents are used to justify rapid military attacks against countries of strategic interest before any investigation is conducted.

In 2015, two acts of terrorism in the U.S. were attributed to white men who survived and were not said to be associated with Muslims. These were the June shooting of nine African Americans in a South Carolina church and the November killing of three people at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado. But the remaining six terrorist events in the West were all attributed to Muslims. Here are quick summaries of how those terrorist events exhibited the features listed above.

Paris in January—The Charlie Hebdo and Kosher Grocery attacks: The first of two major terrorist acts in Paris resulted in a considerable number of as-yet unanswered questions. Not the least of these was that the military-style attackers wore balaclavas to conceal their identities yet left a passport for quick identification. The attackers took pains to associate themselves with Islam yet also displayed professional training like that of special operations soldiers.

Copenhagen in February—Two people were shot dead in separate shootings that were allegedly motivated by art that was disrespectful to Muslims. Police said that Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein committed both crimes and that he died during the second attack. El-Hussein was reported to be well known to Danish intelligence and had been in and out of prison. Despite being sentenced to two years in December 2014 for “serious violence,” he was released in January 2015 and was allegedly engaged in the shootings just two weeks later. Danish citizens have raised questions about the possibility of this being a false-flag attack.

Texas in May—At an anti-Islamic art exhibit featuring images of the Prophet Mohammed in Garland, Texas, two heavily armed gunmen wearing body armor began shooting. One school security officer was shot in the ankle before both of the alleged attackers were killed. The two men had police records and one was the subject of an FBI investigation.

Australia in October—In Parramatta, a 15-year old boy was said to shoot a police employee after visiting a mosque and listening to a lecture by an extremist Islamist leader (according to police). Although Australian authorities called it an act of political terrorism, like most 15-year olds the boy was not politically active and the lecture he attended was about “charity and how to worship God and help others.” His family and friends had no idea that he had any violent tendencies.

Paris in November—In a coordinated series of attacks, terrorists killed 130 people. Just two days later, before an investigation was completed, France began a new bombing campaign in Syria. Only one of the ten suspects, Saleh Abdeslam, survived the attacks. He was first questioned and released by French authorities, even when it was known that he had rented a car used in the crimes. It was reported that Belgian authorities later let him escape. In November it was revealed that Paris police were engaged in a mass shooting exercise the very morning of the attacks.

California in December—The San Bernardino Shootings: The only eyewitness to the shootings said the perpetrators were three tall, athletic, white men in combat-style gear. The witnesses to the getaway said they saw three men in black masks fleeing the scene with rifles in hand. Another said it was three white men in military gear. The attackers got into a black SUV with tinted windows and “calmly” left the scene. Despite these eyewitness reports, the official account quickly became that two small, brown-skinned Muslim people committed the crimes. A few days later, President Obama promoted the new myth without proper investigation or trial and took pains to remind the nation that, “Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11.”

Citizens later learned that there are glaring questions that remain unanswered about the San Bernardino shootings but the media frenzy in support of the government account had already become an entrenched myth. Even as the New York Times retracted reporting on the subject and the Washington Post admitted that American law enforcement officials were “famous for feeding contradictory and unfounded information to the media,” the myth continued to go unchallenged.

Despite the fact that government-sponsored false flag terrorism has been well documented as a fact throughout modern history, terrorism remains a powerful tool for controlling public opinion. The events of 2015 have shown that the propaganda tools for presenting terrorism are being continually refined. The formula used by government and media to report new accounts of terrorism may one day become so well tuned that it will be effective in presenting anyone as a terrorist with little or no actual evidence. It would therefore be wise for all citizens to question all acts of terrorism in order to prevent greater abuses of power.

Eleven years ago, I initiated a discussion about the fact that jet fuel fires could not have melted steel at the World Trade Center. The government agency investigating the WTC destruction responded by holding “some of its deliberations in secret.” Although it’s not a secret that jet fuel can’t melt steel, due to propaganda from sources like The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, Americans often get confused about what facts like that mean to any national discussion. In a nutshell, what it means is that the molten metal found at the WTC, for which there is a great deal of evidence, cannot be explained by the official 9/11 myth.

Today no one thinks that jet fuel fires can melt steel beams—not even The Posts’ new science champion, who doesn’t bother to actually use jet fuel or steel beams to teach us about “retarded metallurgical things.” Instead, he uses a thin metal rod and a blacksmith forge to imply that, if the WTC buildings were made of thin metal rods and there were lots of blacksmith forges there, the thin metal rods would have lost strength and this would be the result. If you buy that as an explanation for what happened at the WTC, you might agree that everyone should just stop questioning 9/11.

This absurd demonstration highlights at least two major problems with America’s ongoing struggle to understand 9/11. The first is that there was a great deal of molten metal at the WTC. Those who know that fact sometimes share internet memes that say “Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams” when they want to convey that “Thermite Melted Steel at the WTC.” The second major problem is that certain mainstream media sources continue to put a lot of energy into dis-informing the public about 9/11.

Sources like The Posts, The New York Times and some “alternative media” continue to work hard to support the official myth of 9/11. That effort is not easy because they must do so while providing as little actual information about 9/11 as possible. The dumbing down of the average citizen is a full time job for such propagandists. Luckily for them, American students receive almost no historical context that encourages them to think critically or consider ideas that conflict with blind allegiance to their government. When it comes to the WTC, it also helps that almost 80% of Americans are scientifically illiterate.

As media companies attempt to confuse the public about 9/11, they must avoid relating details that might actually get citizens interested in the subject. For example, it’s imperative that they never mention any of these fourteen facts about 9/11. It is also important to never reference certain people, like the ordnance distribution expert (and Iran-Contra suspect) who managed security at the WTC or the tortured top al Qaeda leader who turned out to have nothing to do with al Qaeda. In fact, to support the official myth of 9/11 these days, media must ignore almost every aspect of the crimes while promoting only the most mindless nonsense they can find. Unfortunately, that bewildering strategy becomes more obvious every day.

The New York Times led the propaganda behind 9/11 and the 9/11 Wars. It did so by ignoring many of the most relevant facts, by promoting false official accounts, and by belittling those who questioned the 9/11 events. The Times eventually offered a weak public apology for its uncritical support of the Bush Administration’s obviously bogus Iraq War justifications. However, it has yet to apologize for its role in selling the official account of 9/11, a story built on just as many falsehoods. Instead, the newspaper continues to propagandize about the attacks while putting down Americans who seek the truth about what happened.

The New York “newspaper of record” has published many articles that promote official explanations for the events of 9/11. These have included support for the Pancake Theory, the diesel fuel theory for WTC 7, claims based on the torture testimony of an alleged top al Qaeda leader, and accounts of NORAD notification and response to the hijackings. Since then, U.S. authorities have said that none of those explanations were true. However, the Times never expressed regret for reporting the misleading information.

Instead, the Times continued to sell every different official explanation. When a new government theory for destruction of the WTC was put forth, it was immediately promoted. The newspaper never reported any critical analysis of the official accounts, despite the fact that all of them, including the final reports for the Twin Towers and WTC 7, have been proven to be wrong.

When the fourth story arose for how the North American air defenses failed, the one that said U.S. military officers had spent three years giving “false testimony,” the Times pushed it as fact. Its article on the subject simply closed the matter with the statement that “someone will still have to explain why the military, with far greater resources and more time for investigation, could not come up with the real story until the 9/11 commission forced it to admit the truth.” The idea that military officers might have started out telling the truth, thereby leaving very sensitive questions to be answered, and that the 9/11 Commission was now being false, apparently never occurred to the editors.

Meanwhile, the newspaper has made considerable efforts to belittle Americans who question the official account of 9/11.

In June 2006, the Times published a snarky account of a grassroots conference of 9/11 investigators. The article focused on sensational descriptions of the participants, including what it called “a long­haired fellow named hummux who, on and off, lived in a cave for 15 years.’’ The fact that Dr. hummux was a PhD physicist who had worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative for 20 years was not mentioned. The Times simply distorted his experience living with a Native American tribe and falsely stated that he had lived in a cave. No mention was made of serious, undisputed facts that were presented at the conference.

A few months later, at the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the Times published another propaganda article in support of the politically timed reports from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The article began by declaring that those who questioned 9/11 were “an angry minority,” while minimizing a national Scripps Howard poll, published just a month earlier. The poll showed that “More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East.” That is, the number of Americans who thought that federal officials were behind the attacks (36%) was on par with the percentage of Americans who had voted for the president. Yet the Times inferred that it was only a small fraction of the population who questioned 911.

The September 2006 article promoted one Brent Blanchard as a demolition expert, implying that his recent essay refuted any suggestions that the WTC buildings were demolished. As I told the reporter Jim Dwyer, when he interviewed me for the article, “Mr. Blanchard may be a good photographer, but the uninformative bluster that fills the first two and a half pages of this piece, and a good deal throughout the paper, shows that he is not a good writer.” The fact that Blanchard was only a photographer and not a demolition expert was not mentioned by Dwyer, nor was my point-by-point refutation of Blanchard’s limited arguments. Instead, Dwyer purposefully ignored the evidence and ended his article with another quote from Blanchard.

More recently, perhaps in response to another large billboard posted right outside the Times offices, the newspaper has renewed its 9/11 propaganda efforts. In one new article, reporter Mark Leibovich wonders “why is it good to tell the truth but bad to be a ‘Truther’.” Leibovich turns to former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer for support. Of course, the article does not refer to Fleischer’s curious behavior on the morning of 9/11, which stands among the unresolved questions. Instead, Fleischer’s input is that he uses the term “truther” as an epithet (read “truth nigger”), “floating a notion and letting it hang there to absorb sinister connotations.” Leibovich goes on to portray 9/11 questioning as just another form of ridiculous “trutherism” that is “stranger than fiction.“

Leibovich and his colleagues at the Times continue to suggest that they are unaware of the many incredible facts about 9/11 that call out for critical investigation. At this point, however, that level of ignorance is not believable and the Times’ track record shows that it will never take an honest and objective approach to the events of 9/11. As one former Timesreporter stated, the paper’s slogan that it provides all the news ‘fit to print’ really means that it provides all the news that’s fit to serve the powerful. And as long as the needs of the powerful differ from the needs of the people, the truth will be something that is unavailable at the New York Times.

People sometimes wonder why is it important to investigate the alleged hijackers and others officially accused of committing the 9/11 crimes. After all, the accused 19 hijackers could not have accomplished most of what happened. The answer is that the official accounts are important because they are part of the crimes. Identifying and examining the people who created the official 9/11 myth helps to reveal the ones who were responsible overall.

The people who actually committed the crimes of September 11th didn’t intend to just hijack planes and take down the buildings—they intended to blame others. To accomplish that plan the real criminals needed to create a false account of what happened and undoubtedly that need was considered well in advance. In this light, the official reports can be seen to provide a link between the “blaming others” part of the crimes and the physical parts.

Pushing the concept of “Islamic Terrorism” was the beginning of the effort to blame others, although the exact 9/11 plan might not have been worked out at the time. This concept was largely a conversion of the existing Soviet threat, which by 1989 was rapidly losing its ability to frighten the public, into something that would serve more current policy needs. Paul Bremer and Brian Jenkins were at the forefront of this conversion of the Soviet threat into the threat of Islamic terrorism. Both Bremer and Jenkins were also intimately connected to the events at the World Trade Center.

The concerted effort to propagandize about Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (OBL) seems to have begun in earnest in 1998. That’s when the African embassy bombings were attributed to OBL and the as-yet unreported group called Al Qaeda. The U.S. government responded with bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan and, with help from the New York Times, began to drum up an intense myth about the new enemy.

“This is, unfortunately, the war of the future,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said. “The Osama bin Laden organization has basically declared war on Americans and has made very clear that these are all Americans, anywhere.”

In retrospect, it is surprising that this was the first reference to Al Qaeda in the New York Times, coming only three years before 9/11. More surprising is that The Washington Post did not report on Al Qaeda until June 1999, and its reporting was highly speculative about the power behind this new threat.

“But for all its claims about a worldwide conspiracy to murder Americans, the government’s case is, at present, largely circumstantial. The indictment never explains how bin Laden runs al Qaeda or how he may have masterminded the embassy bombings.”

Despite this skepticism from The Post, the reports about Al Qaeda continued in an odd mixture of propaganda and doubt. For example, The Timesreported on the trial of the men accused of the African embassy attacks in May 2001. That article contradicted itself saying that “prosecutors never introduced evidence directly showing that Mr. bin Laden ordered the embassy attacks” and yet that a “former advisor” to Bin Laden, one Ali Mohamed, claimed that Bin Laden “pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.” The fact that Mohamed had worked for the U.S. Army, the FBI, and the CIA was not mentioned.

Other facts were ignored as well. That OBL had worked with the CIA and that Al Qaeda was basically a creation of CIA programs like Operation Cyclone were realities that began to fade into the background. By the time 9/11 happened, those facts were apparently forgotten by a majority of U.S. leaders and media sources. Also overlooked were the histories of people like Frank Carlucci and Richard Armitage, who played major roles in Operation Cyclone and who remained powerful players at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

In the two years before 9/11, the alleged hijackers were very active within the United States. They traveled extensively and often seemed to be making an effort to be noticed. When they were not trying to be noticed, they engaged in distinctly non-Muslim behavior. Mohamed Atta’s actions were erratic, in ways that were similar to those of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Atta appeared to be protected by U.S. authorities.

Meanwhile, leading U.S. terrorism experts seemed to be facilitating Al Qaeda terrorism. Evidence suggests that U.S. intelligence agency leaders Louis Freeh and George Tenet facilitated and covered-up acts of terrorism in the years before 9/11. Both of their agencies, the CIA and FBI, later took extraordinary measures to hide evidence related to the 9/11 attacks. And both agencies have made a mockery of the trial of those officially accused of helping OBL and the alleged hijackers.

Counter-terrorism leader Richard Clarke inexplicably helped OBL stay out of trouble, protecting him on at least two occasions. Clarke blatantly failed to follow-up on known Al Qaeda cells operating within the United States. After 9/11, Clarke was among those who falsely pointed to Abu Zubaydah as a top leader of Al Qaeda. Zubaydah’s torture testimony was then used as the basis for the 9/11 Commission Report.

Former CIA operative Porter Goss created the first official account of what happened on 9/11, along with his mentor Bob Graham. This was the report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry, produced by the intelligence oversight committees of the U.S. Congress. It was greatly influenced by people who should have been prime suspects. For example, Richard Clarke was the one in charge of the secure video conference at the White House that failed miserably to connect leaders and respond to the attacks. In the Joint Inquiry’s report, Clarke was cited as an authoritative reference 46 times. CIA director George Tenet was cited 77 times, and Louis Freeh was cited 31 times.

Therefore it is imperative that the people who worked to create the background story behind OBL and the accused hijackers be investigated for their roles in the 9/11 crimes. This includes not only those who were figureheads behind the official reports, but more importantly the ones who provided the evidence and testimony upon which those reports were built. The alleged hijackers and their associates should also be of considerable interest to 9/11 investigators. That’s because what we know about them was provided by people who we can assume were connected to the crimes and what we don’t yet know about them can reveal more of the truth.